Attensa to the Rescue?

Thanks to my friend Dave, who alerted me to Attensa. This small technology company may be onto something. Attensa was recently featured in a PC World story. They have developed a "behind the firewall" RSS feed server that aims to solve some of the problems we all have with email.

Basically, their server can be setup so that groups of people, project teams, departments or whatever, can subscribe to wikis, blogs, etc and be provided with just in time information as it's published. The feeds integrate to Outlook and mobile devices, so whether your team is local or is comprised of road warriors, everyone has access to the feeds as they happen.

The huge advantage of course, is that the audience who wants to hear the information, subscribes to it - rather than the highly inefficient process currently used by emailers, who "guess" who needs to see the information. If they're wrong (and we usually are), each of our inboxes fill up with loads of unprioritized information, mixed in with the critical communications we really need to do our jobs.

This RSS feed technology has two advantages from my perspective. First, it has the potential of "clearing the email channel" of the "noise" of project updates, news etc that may be important to some, but not relevant to you. That leaves your email box relatively free for the communications that really matter - customer requests, critical internal communications etc.

Secondly, the news flows to you. While I'm a huge fan of Corporate intranets, posting the information in one spot and expecting everyone to go there on a frequent basis has always been a challenge. With RSS feeds, you can not only publish directly to interested groups of people, but you also have the opportunity of posting to your intranet as well. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition.

If I were running a big company, this is a product that I'd definitely look into.